Storage in the Cloud, Kept at Home

Review: Western Digital My Cloud

The My Cloud hard drive from Western Digital starts at $150 for 2 terabytes of storage.

When Western Digital released its My Book Live hard drive last year, it seemed like a convenient way to store content in a personal cloud, alleviating privacy and safety fears associated with other cloud services.

But in my testing, installation was a headache and access to the drive outside my home was spotty. So I was eager to try Western Digital’s new version, My Cloud.

Like its predecessor, My Cloud allows users to store and share content on a home network and use that content from outside the home on mobile devices. The drive costs $150 for 2 terabytes of storage or $180 for 3 terabytes, which sounds expensive until you calculate the cost of a cloud service, which can run $50 to $100 a year.

My Cloud offers other features too. It can connect to other cloud services, like Dropbox, and it serves as a backup utility, automatically syncing with PC or Mac computers to back up all files. Western Digital improved the performance of My Cloud by incorporating a faster processor and added a USB expansion port to allow users to increase the storage capacity.

But Western Digital not only added better hardware, it also made the whole process smoother. After updating my network router, setup was a breeze. My Mac laptop found the drive immediately, and I was transferring files in a matter of minutes using the drive’s new desktop app.

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After downloading a mobile app to my iPhone and iPad, I was able to sync those devices to My Cloud and use the files I had stored there. I tried opening the files at home and in the office, and had no problem in either setting.

The user interface on the mobile app could use some fine-tuning, however. I created separate folders for photos, movies and music, but the files I moved to them contained no metadata, like album artwork or a description. For example, I transferred a few music albums, but the songs in the music folder were a jumble. Unlike a media player like iTunes, My Cloud simply organizes all songs alphabetically by title, without regard to artist or album. I have thousands of albums, and it would be too time-consuming to create a separate folder in My Cloud for each one.